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"I don't believe in God, but if I did, he would be a black left-handed guitarist."

Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers is a study of corrupt idealism, with a cynical and unforgiving core hiding under a dazed, playful exterior. I'm not sure what attracted the legendary filmmaker to this story -- if anything, I would have expected him to embrace the sort of activity he winds up condemning -- but his handling of the material is subtle and assured, the explicit sexuality appropriate and, in hindsight, rather powerful. But that's par for the course; what may surprise Bertolucci fans is the way he deliberately misleads us, turning on his characters just when we think it's time for triumphant justification, affirming what we suspected all along but feared to put into words.

The film is set in 1968 Paris, but if you think you're in for a picturesque, nostalgic period piece... well, you're crazy. The opening narration, courtesy of Matthew (Michael Pitt), a young American trying to absorb as much of Paris as possible, certainly romanticizes the setting to no end, describing the city as a beguiling hotbed of cinephilia and liberal activism. Matthew throws himself into the fray, devouring every 35 mm print he can get his eyes on from the front rows of the grand French movie theaters. "Only the French would house a cinema inside a palace," he muses.

At a demonstration against the expulsion of a beloved cinema programmer, Matthew meets Theo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green), French siblings who seem like exactly the kind of people he has been yearning to meet ("I've just met my first French friends," he writes to his mother). Perhaps more passionate about cinema and causes than even Matthew, the two live in their own world, and they invite him to partake, offering him a room in their vast home while their parents are away.

Their friendship quickly takes odd and vaguely sinister turns -- the wrong answer to a movie trivia question results in punishment, consisting of public masturbation, or sex. "I want you to do it the way you did when you thought no one was watching," says Isabelle to Theo regarding the former, and danged if he doesn't. Matthew is bewildered, not least by the incestuous relationship between his new friends, but he goes along anyway, relishing the attention and the apparent opportunity to put some of his principles into action.

Visually, Bertolucci is going for a feel that is as quintessentially cinematic as possible. When he is not actually intercutting snippets of classic cinema (including Queen Christina and, frighteningly, Freaks), he is plastering his backdrops with huge shadows and making triptychs of his characters with mirrors; there is one exhilarating shot in which Isabelle's hair catches fire from a candle and, in barely perceptible slow motion, Matthew puts it out with his hand.

The extent to which Theo and Isabelle live in isolation from the actual world becomes progressively more disturbing, and Matthew makes increasingly fervent attempts to force reality upon the introverted pair. The sexuality, which seems tender and frank at first, begins to border on the asexual as we realize that it has no meaning beyond the act itself, which Theo and Isabelle turn into a childish game. Matthew eventually allows himself an angry outburst, asking Isabelle if she has ever been on a date with a boy who was not her brother. Then, heartbreakingly, he takes her out on one.

At one point, Theo and Isabelle's parents return and find them sleeping together, naked, legs intertwined, in a tent, the rest of the house an unspeakable mess. They leave a check on the table and depart once more, the father questioning if they can just take off like that, and the mother replying, "What do you want to do, have dinner with them?" At first, it seems that Bertolucci wants us to sneer at these conservative, intolerant old folk, but before long we realize that theirs was in fact a heroic act, the most overt mode of acceptance that they will ever be able to show.

The ending shows them -- or at least two of them -- unworthy of that benefit of the doubt, as the walls they built to isolate themselves finally begin to collapse. A rock crashes through the window, "The street came flying into the room!" screams Isabel, and as the real world finally asserts itself, Theo and Isabel's convictions about peace and love and harmless play prove entirely for naught. This is the problem with unhinged, untethered, oblivious idealism. The street inevitably comes flying into the room.